


Awakening

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2018 [30]
Category: Split (2016)
Genre: (I mean it's pretty tragic), Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Drama, During Canon, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Strong Language, Tragedy, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 02:52:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16507970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: Kevin wakes up- briefly.





	Awakening

God damn it.  
  
Not again.  
  
Last Kevin remembered, he’d been on a bus- he’d been coming back from an appointment with Dr. Fletcher. And now he was in his kitchen, his shirt missing, limbs shaking, and vision blurry. He looked around, braced himself on the stove as he struggled to his feet, body curiously weak and aching. There was a blanket folded on the stovetop- a blanket he recognized, but did not recall leaving on the stove when he had left that morning. As he reached out he saw his hands _-_ was that blood? The skin on the back of his hand, particularly near the knuckles, was discolored and bruised.  
  
God damn it, what had his alters gotten up to?  
  
The alters, they could ‘hear’ each other when one of them was out- generally speaking, anyway. But Kevin couldn’t hear a thing, had no idea what they were up to when he was out, and it was a nerve-wracking and terrifying thing to come back to himself and not recall what he’d been doing. At least this time he was home, in a place that he recognized and felt safe in; once he’d woken up- _literally_ \- in a ditch because one of the alters had gotten shit-faced drunk and passed out.  
  
They were there to protect him, Dr. Fletcher had told him. They were a psychological defense mechanism; Kevin preferred to think of them as a pain in the ass. Barry was the only one that didn’t scare the shit out of him when he took over: Unlike most of the others, Barry and Kevin were similar enough in personality that Barry could pass as Kevin without much effort. He also actually _cared_ about passing as Kevin, actually cared about wrangling the other alters so that Kevin could maintain some semblance of normalcy. Barry was one of the few Kevin could say he really liked.  
  
But he still didn’t like the dissociating.  
  
He draped the blanket over his shoulders and rubbed his eyes. Kevin was lightheaded, still strangely not-there just yet, and that gave him a terrible sense of foreboding: This feeling of disconnection was usually what he felt after being ‘out’ for a long, long time. The last time he’d felt like this he’d been out for a full month, with various alters taking control in the meantime. He’d have to check the computer to see if any of them had left a log of what they’d been doing while he was out.  
  
Kevin hobbled towards the living room, eyes adjusting to the light as he rounded the corner to-  
  
-a person?  
  
Standing in the living room was a girl.  
  
A _young_ girl. Late teens, early twenties at the oldest. She looked at him with wide, watery eyes. Her fists were clenched at her side, and he could see they were trembling as hard as his were.  
  
“Who are you?” He rasped. “What… What’s happening?”  
  
“Something _horrible_ ,” The girl said, voice shaking.  
  
Dread flooded him, choked him; blood on his hands, a scared girl in his house, and he didn’t remember a thing. If he had to take a _fucking_ guess, it was Dennis that had gotten up to some shit again.  
  
God, maybe if he begged she wouldn’t call the cops.  
  
“What’d I do?”  
  
She didn’t answer; Kevin began to feel dizzy. He didn’t want the answer, but he needed it regardless. It wasn’t the first time one of his alters had gotten him into trouble, and one of his greatest fears was that one day the problem-personalities like Dennis would escalate to something way worse than anything they’d done before.  
  
“Did I hurt you?”  
  
She wasn’t visibly injured- no blood, no bruising, no scratch-marks- but the look in her eyes said that he’d scared her something fierce, and Kevin knew that Dennis had a habit of inducing that sort of fear in young women.  
  
Jesus, where was Barry? He usually had a handle on this. He usually had a handle on _them_. He wished that he could speak to him directly like the alters could to one another. (Of course, if he were wishing, his primary wish would be that they had separate bodies so that he wouldn’t be responsible for their bullshit- and so he could clock Dennis for some of the shit he’d gotten Kevin into in the past.)  
  
The girl wasn’t moving, wasn’t speaking. Some of the fear had left her face- still anxious and overwhelmed, but not quite as afraid anymore. God, he hoped the others had been visible enough to make it clear that he had DID, or she was going to think it was _him_ who’d done whatever had been done to her- even if it technically _was_ him. Kevin hoped to fuck that maybe Hedwig had gone out and dragged some girl back, maybe freaked her out but didn’t hurt her.  
  
Kevin took a step closer, and the girl didn’t move, didn’t scream. But she did look down at something on the carpet, and Kevin naturally looked as well-  
  
…No.  
  
_No._  
  
“Dr. Fletcher,” he croaked, voice faltering. “Dr. Fletcher.”  
  
He might not have recognized the girl, but the old woman lying on the floor was as familiar to him as his own face: Dr. Fletcher was motionless, her eyes open slightly, not breathing.  
  
No. No, no, no, no, no.  
  
“Who did that?” Kevin asked, even though he already knew the answer. Please, _please_ let it be that some disgruntled zoo employee had come down here and attacked her. Please, _please_ let it have been some random psychopath that one of his alters witlessly allowed into his home.  
  
But the girl swallowed thickly, blinking away tears. “You did,” She whispered.  
  
Kevin felt bile churning in his stomach. The worst had happened: One of them had finally _fucking_ killed someone. And of all people, it had to be one of the few people in the world that actually believed he had DID. One of the few consistent, supportive people he’d had in his life.  
  
“I swear,” He said, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice and failing. “I was on a bus. I don’t remember anything after that, I-” A horrible thought occurred to him, and he asked, voice cracking: “-this is still September 18, 2014, right?”  
  
The girl stared at him, mouth screwed up like she was about to cry.  
  
She shook her head. _No._  
  
Kevin’s eyes fell shut.  
  
He didn’t need to ask for the date; he already knew it was going to be something much, much later than what he wanted to hear.  
  
Dr. Fletcher was dead as a doornail on the floor of her patient’s living room- her patient with twenty-three additional personalities lurking in his head, who couldn’t account for their movements in the slightest. But he’d sworn that almost all of them at least _liked_ Dr. Fletcher- which of them had done this?  
  
_It doesn’t matter,_ Kevin thought, heaving a deep breath and falling effortlessly into the pit of darkness and despair that always came over him when he woke up and realized one of his alters had done something wrong when he was out. _It doesn’t matter. It’s my body, my alters, my crime. Doesn’t matter if it wasn’t **me** , I’ll still spend the rest of my life in jail for it._  
  
Part of him wanted to scream for the frustration of it, that another personality of his had used his body to such violent ends and left him holding the bag. What sort of defense was it to say ‘It was me, but _not_ me- it was a personality that my brain constructed when I was a kid, so I guess it technically _is_ me, but not _me_ me.’  
  
It wasn’t one. Nothing that would keep him out of prison or a mental hospital for the rest of his days.  
  
And even then Kevin knew he’d still be a threat to others. Patricia, Dennis, and a few of the others- they couldn’t be trusted, if this was what they were going to do. And the good alters, they’d failed to stop the attack as well, which meant they were either unable or unwilling to do so. Either way it was an unsalvageable situation: He doubted prison would force them to behave, either; they’d try to escape, or they’d attack someone, and Kevin would again be forced to do the time for their crime. They had killed once, after all- and they would do it again.  
  
That left one option.  
  
Kevin looked at the girl.  
  
“There’s a shotgun I bought,” He said, forcing the words out before he could lose his nerve. “It’s in the bottom cabinet hidden behind things.” He nodded to the cabinet in question, and she turned to look. “The shells are in my uniform closet out in the service hall.” When she met his eyes, he could see comprehension there: She knew where he was going with this. But she looked at him in disbelief.  
  
_He can’t be asking me this,_ she must be thinking.  
  
But he had to.  
  
The alters would stop him if he tried to do it himself.  
  
“Kill me,” He begged. “Kill me.”  
  
She looked conflicted, uncertain- what a nice kid, Kevin considered bleakly. He must have scared the unholy shit out of her, and she wasn’t running for the shotgun to acquiesce with his request. Nice kid. Of course she was- Dennis liked the nice ones, the innocent ones, the pretty ones.  
  
Suddenly, there was a tug- it was almost as though someone was pulling on the back of his neck. Tension rose in the muscles there, and his hearing cut out; the room disappeared before his eyes, the last image in his mind of the pretty girl staring at him with those sad, dark eyes.  
  
Kevin fell away.  
  
He’d be happy if he never came back.  
  
He just hoped the girl would be okay.  
   
-End


End file.
